I wonder if we will ever let go of the cliche that young girls, practically from toddlerdom and upwards, spend hours meticulously planning their weddings in crayon and crepe paper. Perhaps once upon a time this was a legitimate dream, when opportunities for women were so limited that being a bride was practically the only aspiration you could see becoming a reality. Well, it's been a struggle, but nowadays we are no longer expected to simply sit and look pretty and wait for marriage...

Evidently, we haven't been that mad about it for a while because a study published last week by the Office for National Statistics shows a huge rise in the number of children born "out of wedlock" over the past 15 years. So what does this mean for the next generation? Should we be opening counselling centres on every street corner in an attempt to combat a future of children racked by emotional instability? Or maybe there will be a backlash and every teenager in 2030 will put a ring on the hand of the first person who looks nice with their clothes off.

One thing that's not been much pondered is how the decline in marriage might affect children's relationships with each other. It's true that at school you chew over every tiny granule of information that you can scrabble together about your friends. Is it possible that having unmarried parents – or, indeed, married parents as they become a minority – might become a weapon with which children could beat their peers?

Perhaps. But its importance will slip away and become no more profound than teasing over accents, or appearance, or any of the other multitude of things that can be twisted into an insult. The idea that kids are currently being protected from certain forms of bullying because most people's parents are married is absurd. There are bigger and better things to worry about at school, like discussing trainer bras and getting to the vending machine before the breaktime rush. And where you're going to sit so the teachers can't see you chewing gum, and, oh sorry, I just got distracted ... which is pretty emblematic of the fact that young Britons don't care. They won't care in 2025 because they didn't care in 1999 and they don't care now.

As a 23-year-old with married but now separated parents, I can safely say that I never once took solace in the fact that the people who raised me once signed a piece of paper in a town hall. It's incredibly unlikely that huge numbers of British children are going to bemoan the legal status of their parents' relationship, probably because it's the relationship part of a marriage that is important, not the terminology.

Honestly, if we're becoming less concerned about wasting inordinate amounts of money on a day spent crying into a big cake and more concerned with ensuring children are brought into a loving, nurturing environment, then we're probably doing something right. Don't you think?